Deception Point (3 page)

“Thirty-
four,”
she snapped. “Your secretary sent a card.”

He clucked ruefully. “Thirty-four. Almost an old maid. You know by the time I was thirty-four, I’d already—”

“Married Mom and screwed the neighbor?” The words came out louder than Rachel had intended, her voice hanging naked in an ill-timed lull. Diners nearby glanced over.

Senator Sexton’s eyes flash-froze, two ice-crystals boring into her. “You watch yourself, young lady.”

Rachel headed for the door.
No, you watch yourself, senator.

T
he three men sat in silence inside their ThermaTech storm tent. Outside, an icy wind buffeted the shelter, threatening to tear it from its moorings. None of the men took notice; each had seen situations far more threatening than this one.

Their tent was stark white, pitched in a shallow depression, out of sight. Their communication devices, transport, and weapons were all state-of-the-art. The group leader was code-named Delta-One. He was muscular and lithe with eyes as desolate as the topography on which he was stationed.

The military chronograph on Delta-One’s wrist emitted a sharp beep. The sound coincided in perfect unison with beeps emitted from the chronographs worn by the other two men.

Another thirty minutes had passed.

It was time. Again.

Reflexively, Delta-One left his two partners and stepped outside into the darkness and pounding wind. He scanned the moonlit horizon with infrared binoculars. As always, he focused on the structure. It was a thousand meters away—an enormous and unlikely edifice rising from the barren terrain.
He and his team had been watching it for ten days now, since its construction. Delta-One had no doubt that the information inside would change the world. Lives already had been lost to protect it.

At the moment, everything looked quiet outside the structure.

The true test, however, was what was happening
inside.

Delta-One reentered the tent and addressed his two fellow soldiers. “Time for a flyby.”

Both men nodded. The taller of them, Delta-Two, opened a laptop computer and turned it on. Positioning himself in front of the screen, Delta-Two placed his hand on a mechanical joystick and gave it a short jerk. A thousand meters away, hidden deep within the building, a surveillance robot the size of a mosquito received his transmission and sprang to life.

R
achel Sexton was still steaming as she drove her white Integra up Leesburg Pike. The bare maples of the Falls Church foothills rose stark against a crisp March sky, but the peaceful setting did little to calm her anger. Her father’s recent surge in the polls should have endowed him with a modicum of confident grace, and yet it seemed only to fuel his self-importance.

The man’s deceit was doubly painful because he was the only immediate family Rachel had left. Rachel’s mother had died three years ago, a devastating loss whose emotional scars still raked at Rachel’s heart. Rachel’s only solace was knowing that the death, with ironic compassion, had liberated her mother from a deep despair over a miserable marriage to the senator.

Rachel’s pager beeped again, pulling her thoughts back to the road in front of her. The incoming message was the same.

—RPRT DIRNRO STAT—

Report to the director of NRO stat.
She sighed.
I’m coming, for God’s sake!

With rising uncertainty, Rachel drove to her usual exit, turned onto the private access road, and rolled to a stop at the heavily armed sentry booth. This was 14225 Leesburg Pike, one of the most secretive addresses in the country.

While the guard scanned her car for bugs, Rachel gazed out at the mammoth structure in the distance. The one-million-square-foot complex sat majestically on sixty-eight forested acres just outside D.C. in Fairfax, Virginia. The building’s facade was a bastion of one-way glass that reflected the army of satellite dishes, antennas, and rayodomes on the surrounding grounds, doubling their already awe-inspiring numbers.

Two minutes later, Rachel had parked and crossed the manicured grounds to the main entrance, where a carved granite sign announced

NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE (NRO)

The two armed Marines flanking the bulletproof revolving door stared straight ahead as Rachel passed between them. She felt the same sensation she always felt as she pushed through these doors . . . that she was entering the belly of a sleeping giant.

Inside the vaulted lobby, Rachel sensed the faint echoes of hushed conversations all around her, as if the words were sifting down from the offices above. An enormous tiled mosaic proclaimed the NRO directive:

ENABLING U.S. GLOBAL INFORMATION SUPERIORITY, DURING PEACE AND THROUGH WAR.

The walls here were lined with massive photographs—rocket launches, submarine christenings, intercept installations—towering achievements that could be celebrated only within these walls.

Now, as always, Rachel felt the problems of the outside world fading behind her. She was entering the shadow world.
A world where the problems thundered in like freight trains, and the solutions were meted out with barely a whisper.

As Rachel approached the final checkpoint, she wondered what kind of problem had caused her pager to ring twice in the last thirty minutes.

“Good morning, Ms. Sexton.” The guard smiled as she approached the steel doorway.

Rachel returned the smile as the guard held out a tiny swab for Rachel to take.

“You know the drill,” he said.

Rachel took the hermetically sealed cotton swab and removed the plastic covering. Then she placed it in her mouth like a thermometer. She held it under her tongue for two seconds. Then, leaning forward, she allowed the guard to remove it. The guard inserted the moistened swab into a slit in a machine behind him. The machine took four seconds to confirm the DNA sequences in Rachel’s saliva. Then a monitor flickered on, displaying Rachel’s photo and security clearance.

The guard winked. “Looks like you’re still you.” He pulled the used swab from the machine and dropped it through an opening, where it was instantly incinerated. “Have a good one.” He pressed a button and the huge steel doors swung open.

As Rachel made her way into the maze of bustling corridors beyond, she was amazed that even after six years here she was still daunted by the colossal scope of this operation. The agency encompassed six other U.S. installations, employed over ten thousand agents, and had operating costs of over $10 billion per year.

In total secrecy, the NRO built and maintained an astonishing arsenal of cutting-edge spy technologies: worldwide electronic intercepts; spy satellites; silent, embedded relay chips in telecomm products; even a global naval-recon network known as Classic Wizard, a secret web of 1,456 hydrophones mounted on seafloors around the world, capable of monitoring ship movements anywhere on the globe.

NRO technologies not only helped the United States win military conflicts, but they provided an endless stream of peacetime data to agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, helping them thwart terrorism, locate
crimes against the environment, and give policymakers the data needed to make informed decisions on an enormous array of topics.

Rachel worked here as a “gister.” Gisting, or data reduction, required analyzing complex reports and distilling their essence or “gist” into concise, single-page briefs. Rachel had proven herself a natural.
All those years of cutting through my father’s bullshit,
she thought.

Rachel now held the NRO’s premier gisting post—intelligence liaison to the White House. She was responsible for sifting through the NRO’s daily intelligence reports, deciding which stories were relevant to the President, distilling those reports into single-page briefs, and then forwarding the synopsized material to the President’s National Security Adviser. In NRO-speak, Rachel Sexton “manufactured finished product and serviced
the
customer.”

Although the job was difficult and required long hours, the position was a badge of honor for her, a way to assert her independence from her father. Senator Sexton had offered many times to support Rachel if she would quit the post, but Rachel had no intention of becoming financially beholden to a man like Sedgewick Sexton. Her mother was testimony to what could happen when a man like that held too many cards.

The sound of Rachel’s pager echoed in the marble hall.

Again?
She didn’t even bother to check the message.

Wondering what the hell was going on, she boarded the elevator, skipped her own floor, and went straight to the top.

T
o call the NRO director a plain man was in itself an overstatement. NRO Director William Pickering was diminutive, with pale skin, a forgettable face, a bald head, and hazel eyes, which despite having gazed upon the country’s deepest
secrets, appeared as two shallow pools. Nonetheless, to those who worked under him, Pickering towered. His subdued personality and unadorned philosophies were legendary at the NRO. The man’s quiet diligence, combined with his wardrobe of plain black suits, had earned him the nickname the “Quaker.” A brilliant strategist and the model of efficiency, the Quaker ran his world with an unrivaled clarity. His mantra: “Find the truth. Act on it.”

When Rachel arrived in the director’s office, he was on the phone. Rachel was always surprised by the sight of him: William Pickering looked nothing like a man who wielded enough power to wake the President at any hour.

Pickering hung up and waved her in. “Agent Sexton, have a seat.” His voice had a lucid rawness to it.

“Thank you, sir.” Rachel sat.

Despite most people’s discomfort around William Pickering’s blunt demeanor, Rachel had always liked the man. He was the exact antithesis of her father . . . physically unimposing, anything but charismatic, and he did his duty with a selfless patriotism, shunning the spotlight her father loved so much.

Pickering removed his glasses and gazed at her. “Agent Sexton, the President called me about a half hour ago. In direct reference to you.”

Rachel shifted in her seat. Pickering was known for getting to the point.
One hell of an opening,
she thought. “Not a problem with one of my gists, I hope.”

“On the contrary. He says the White House is impressed with your work.”

Rachel exhaled silently. “So what did he want?”

“A meeting with you. In person. Immediately.”

Rachel’s unease sharpened. “A personal meeting? About
what?”

“Damn good question. He wouldn’t tell me.”

Now Rachel was lost. Keeping information from the director of the NRO was like keeping Vatican secrets from the Pope. The standing joke in the intelligence community was that if William Pickering didn’t know about it, it hadn’t happened.

Pickering stood, pacing now in front of his window. “He
asked that I contact you immediately and send you to meet with him.”

“Right now?”

“He sent transportation. It’s waiting outside.”

Rachel frowned. The President’s request was unnerving on its own account, but it was the look of concern on Pickering’s face that really worried her. “You obviously have reservations.”

“I sure as hell do!” Pickering showed a rare flash of emotion. “The President’s timing seems almost callow in its transparency. You are the daughter of the man who is currently challenging him in the polls, and he demands a private meeting with you? I find this highly inappropriate. Your father no doubt would agree.”

Rachel knew Pickering was right—not that she gave a damn what her father thought. “Do you not trust the President’s motives?”

“My oath is to provide intel support to the current White House administration, not pass judgment on their politics.”

Typical Pickering response,
Rachel realized. William Pickering made no bones about his view of politicians as transitory figureheads who passed fleetingly across a chessboard whose real players were men like Pickering himself—seasoned “lifers” who had been around long enough to understand the game with some perspective. Two full terms in the White House, Pickering often said, was not nearly enough to comprehend the true complexities of the global political landscape.

“Maybe it’s an innocent request,” Rachel offered, hoping the President was above trying some sort of cheap campaign stunt. “Maybe he needs a reduction of some sensitive data.”

“Not to sound belittling, Agent Sexton, but the White House has access to plenty of qualified gisting personnel if they need it. If it’s an internal White House job, the President should know better than to contact you. And if not, then he sure as hell should know better than to request an NRO asset and then refuse to tell me what he wants it for.”

Pickering always referred to his employees as assets, a manner of speech many found disconcertingly cold.

“Your father is gaining political momentum,” Pickering said. “A
lot
of it. The White House has got to be getting nervous.” He
sighed. “Politics is a desperate business. When the President calls a secret meeting with his challenger’s daughter, I’d guess there’s more on his mind than intelligence gists.”

Rachel felt a distant chill. Pickering’s hunches had an uncanny tendency to be dead on. “And you’re afraid the White House feels desperate enough to introduce
me
into the political mix?”

Pickering paused a moment. “You are not exactly silent about your feelings for your father, and I have little doubt the President’s campaign staff is aware of the rift. It occurs to me that they may want to use you against him somehow.”

“Where do I sign up?” Rachel said, only half-joking.

Pickering looked unimpressed. He gave her a stern stare. “A word of warning, Agent Sexton. If you feel that your personal issues with your father are going to cloud your judgment in dealing with the President, I strongly advise that you decline the President’s request for a meeting.”

“Decline?” Rachel gave a nervous chuckle. “I obviously can’t refuse the President.”